Category Archives: PI Basics

The Flip and In Other News

In Other News first… my laptop is pushing up the daisies. Not entirely sure if I can resurrect it at the moment (although the hard drive is fine), but meanwhile, I shall be the more-than-averagely Occasional Capsuleer. Wave your hand if you happen to have a vaguely Eve capable laptop you’re not in need of right now and live in the UK…

In the meantime, I have performed a spot of necromancy and resurrected my really, really old Acer as a temporary stand in. Having made enough space to make the install, it is now home to a shiny new Eve download and I even managed to make a trip to Jita and restart my PI without it blowing up in my face. I am also training up for an extra PI planet while on holiday; might as well use the non-playing time in a vaguely useful way having brought Combat Drones up to V for Kronos.

So, the Flip. This is a term I have coined for an irritating problem I sometimes run in into while doing PI and trying to make a P2 product on a single planet. Some resources on planets are, inevitably, in short supply. So producing two P1s can often result in few of one, and lots of another. Being lazy (and short on time) I do my best to balance them out to avoid surplus, but on some planets no matter how few extractors you put on, say, Biofuels, you always end up with way more than you need. The solution? The Flip.

It’s pretty simple actually. If producing Biocells, for example, Precious Metals production is likely to be well below Biofuels production. So, after a couple of weeks of producing both, stop producing Biofuels and use the extractors to pull in Noble Metals instead. Repeat this until you have eliminated your reserve of Biofuels, then Flip back to Biofuel production.

Assuming you have a decent surplus, given the disparity in resource richness, you should find that this allows you to keep production steady and in line with your other planets without resorting to importing additional Precious Metals or otherwise having to mess around with your supply lines. You keep everything on-planet, and carry on regardless. You might do this using one planet for Precious Metals and one for Biofuels, but the imbalance would still be there and you’d have to move bulkier resources around, which means more taxation.

Right. Holiday time. On my return, I’ll share a little statistic that might help with your PI planning…

Planetary Interaction – a Word to the Wise

Just a couple of things I though I’d cover while they were in the front of my mind.  Like most things in Eve, it is perfectly possible to make mistakes doing PI and for the UI to fail to point them out to you.  In fairness, if you make changes and try and exit without submitting them, it will flag that.  However, there is one thing it won’t, and I suppose can’t, do or warn you about.

Failure to route.

I have made this mistake myself.  For some reason I change the resource I’m harvesting, or the blueprint a manufacturing facility is using.  Where once there was a route for the resulting product, there may now be none.  So all that product will go into a deep dark hole, never to be seen again.  Irritating?  Yes.  Expensive?  Possibly.  Avoidable?  Absolutely.  Every time you make a change, think about routing, where things need to come from, where things need to go.  The game will not do it for you – it can’t know if you want to just store output, or pass it to another processor.

A short post, I know, but perhaps a useful reminder if you can’t figure out why your end product has disappeared…

Planetary Extraction 101

This form of resource mining was a real boon for me. I was probably on the verge of leaving Eve for lack of cash, but then planetary mining was introduced. So all of a sudden there was a completely hands off, hi sec based way of making ISK. Lovely.

There are of course levels of complexity to planetary interaction like everything else in Eve. I, being a completist, like to produce the highest level planetary products using a ridiculously complex chain of planets. I know. Now, there is method to my madness. You could just harvest lots of basic P1 products, like bacteria, but they’re bulky. The higher up the food chain you go, the more compression you get. So I compact down to reduce required cargo capacity, saving me multiple trips to hubs in slow industrials.  I tend to move products within a single system in a Mammoth, then haul the end products in a Prowler (character dependent) for speed.

Places like Eve Uni (see links section) will give you the full breakdown on what can be mined from what planet, and what products make up other products and so on.  Let me just note a few things here to try and give you a brief overview of things to consider.  You will not collect as much in hi sec as you would in low or null sec, but you will lose far fewer ships doing it in hi sec.

  • Make sure you can upgrade your command centers to a reasonable extent.  That will give you a degree more flexibility when putting your networks together.
  • Train the new Customs Code Expertise skill.  I was slow to pick up on its introduction, and it will make hi sec import/export cheaper for you.
  • If starting from scratch, take a long hard look at the tax rates the now largely Player Owned Customs Offices (POCOs) are going to charge you on top of the basic taxation.  Some are just taking the p*ss.  Try and find a system that has what you need and whose POCOs aren’t going to rip you off.
  • Stay in one system.  It’s just faster.  Make sure that system has a station to use so you can park stuff there.  I, for example, use an alt to harvest in the same system as another alt, and one can then contract their products to the other in the same station.  Simples.
  • Use your in-account alts.  I was very slow to do this.  But you can basically triple your ability to make ISK from PI just by training some very basic skills on your alts, and you also increase the number of planets you have access to.  For the occasional capsuleer, using alts in this fashion is very, very handy and involves no additional expense.  PI will run happily for all your alts while you’re AFK.  Happy happy joy joy.

I’ll outline in a future post how I typically run one of my planets to produce a P2 product, which will give you a more practical view of day to day PI, hopefully.